Recent technological advances have led to the increased prevalence of electronic devices, e.g., small electronic devices such as handheld media devices and cellular telephones. These electronic devices often are able to store large amounts of data, e.g., numbers, text, music, photographs, videos, and documents, for audio and/or visual display. Typical graphical user interfaces for electronic devices include a hierarchical menu structure for navigating through the stored data for selection. As the storage capacity of these devices grows, it becomes increasingly important to provide for effective browsing and selection of the desired data. Furthermore, due to the small size of many electronic media devices, these devices typically have small display devices for displaying information used to navigate.
Often, these types of electronic devices provide one-dimensional presentation of menus on a display. Conventional one-dimensional presentation of menus involves presenting a single menu level of a hierarchical menu structure on the display for selection. Selection of an item in the single menu level results in the display of a subsequent menu level. Further, subsequent selections result in the display of subsequent menu levels to allow “drilling down” to the desired final selection. Devices supporting one-dimensional presentation of menus are useful due to their high compatibility to the menu hierarchy. In a menu hierarchy, data are classified and distributed in a tree structure where they become searchable through a series of attribute matching. As a result, each menu typically contains only a small number of options that can easily be synchronized to a one-dimensional scrolling mechanism/device for selection.